Marketing is gross. It feels icky. But it's the only option, right?

I wanna use this brain-dump to explore why I hate marketing and if there might be some better way to go about being a creative and making a survivable living doing so.

Why Marketing Sucks.

• I don't like being marketed to, so how can I do it to others?
• Marketing feels like an invasion of a space to trick people into buying something they don't want or need.
• The fact that it's a game with tricks and tactics and one-ups-man-ship just feels gross. Competition isn't my thing. I much prefer collaboration. I prefer to rest on a rising tide than wake up to catch worms.
• It's terribly ineffective. The number I've generally seen is that marketing has a 1/100 engagement rate. And as I understand, that's generous and depends on were you're at. An ad on Amazon may have a 1/100 rate, but marketing with social media has a 1/100 who see you content will engage and then 1/100 of that will actually buy. That's a fundamental reliance on quantity over quality.
• "In the attention economy, social media is the banking industry."

Are There Better Alternatives?

Before looking at better alternatives to marketing, maybe I should list ways that artists can make money first.

How Artists Make Money

(By no means is this exhaustive, this is a brain-dump after all.)

• selling goods (books, original or printed works, CDs, etc.)
• selling services (commissions, or possibly services helping other artists ie: a writer selling editing services. However, that feels like a job to support your art, not your art supporting you.)
• ad revenue (your art brings and audience that can be advertised to)
• patronage/ subscriptions (sugar daddies)
• ad/subscription hybrid (basically any streaming service)
• industry work (having a job making something for someone else) (not relevant for this discussion really)

How Does Each Relate to Marketing?

• goods: gotta find people to sell to and inform past customers of new stuff. more people you sell to the more money you make. Pretty margin dependent. High margin products require less people, requires less marketing in theory.
• services: same as goods. tends to be a higher margin endeavor though.
• ad revenue: need preexisting large audience. Buying ads to sell ads sounds like a terrible idea. This is a bit of a different game relevant only to fields where your creation is expected to be consumed for free (YouTube and music mainly) thought it isn't the only option for those fields.
• patronage/ subscription: consistent payment upfront (kinda) to keep making new stuff. Can kinda be high margin but high pressure to constantly produce as well. You need to market to get new subscribers somehow though.
• hybrid: pretty much the same as ad revenue, but there's less of the 'buying ads to sell ads' thing though. This also has a bit more/ too much platform dependence and blends with industry work. You're getting a slice, but really you're an employee of YouTube or Spotify.
• industry work: you don't have to deal with marketing at all which is nice. But you don't really own your work. It's a trade off. Respectable and much more stable, but not for me.

Alternatives to Marketing

So, are there any true alternatives to marketing?

At the end of the day, no, not at all.

Marketing is, at it's core, informing people about and getting them to pay for your work.

With no marketing, no one knows and no one pays.

That's just how it is.

So, the question now isn't looking for true alternatives. Now, the question is how to market more effectively and less grossly than the current systems.

So, how do we inform and get people to pay for what we make efficiently while not participating in the things that suck about marketing.

One Thousand True Fans

I feel like this whole thing is me dancing around the idea of 1000 true fans and not actually mentioning it or just taking the long way around to get to it.

So, we'll just cut to it.

While I haven't looked into it fully, I'm a believer in the general logic of the 1000 True Fans theory.

Basically, as I understand it, you can make a living as an artist if you have 1000 people who are truly a fan of what you do and monetarily engage with everything you do.

You'll obviously have more casual fans than the core 1000, but it's that core 1000 that give you a consistent income to live off of. Casual fans are too volatile of an income source to really live from.

With this idea, it is necessary to use marketing to get your 1000 true fans, but once you have them, something like an email list is sufficient to inform them of your work. When you have 1000 true fans, you no longer need to use the parts of marketing that feel gross. You're simply telling someone who's interested in your work that you have something new for them.

(note: as relates to forms of money making, the patron/subscription model is what works really well when focusing on true fans instead of casual fans. I skipped mentioning it because it was more dancing around the idea of true fans, but the patron model is the model that requires the least marketing because you can reach a point where you don't need new patrons, you just need to keep what you have.)

Efficient Marketing

Focusing on gaining 1000 true fans gives a bit of direction and focus to any marketing you do. But, it makes the general marketing numbers even worse.

While running an Amazon ad may get 1/100 who see it to buy your thing, 1/100 of those 1/100 will become true fans. Of those 1/100 who engage on social media 1/100 give you money and 1/100 of those giving you money will be a true fan.

Finding a true fan using general marketing strategies is abysmally slow and expensive.

General marketing wisdom is simply based on sales numbers, not fan numbers. General marketing doesn't care if someone sticks around to buy your next book, they're just focused on getting people to buy your current one.

So rejecting the traditional wisdom and methods has the potential of going a long way towards finding your 1000 true fans quicker and in turn lead to a sustainable art career quicker than the traditional methods.

But what is the marketing wisdom for finding true fans? That's the tricky part.

I have no answers. Only vague ideas and notions. I have things to try, but nothing that's tried and true.

My first idea for how to more consistently find true fans is to find them in the spaces right where you are. Wherever you go to find the things you like, that's likely where you're going to find people who like the things you make.

It's pretty simple and straight forward, but seems to go against everything a marketing 'expert' will tell you.

I don't use social media, I can't stand it. I'm not going to have much in common with someone who uses social media a lot, why should I expect it to be a good way to find the people who would like my work?

Sure social media has a lot of eyeballs, but very, very few of those eyeballs will be a true fan of mine. I'd rather not look for a particular needle in a stack of needles.

So, where do I find the works of people that I'm a true fan of?

That's the biggest problem with this whole theory. I'm not really a fan of anyone. Correction, I'm not really a true fan of anyone.

So, I have no idea where to look for my true fans because I've never been one.

It's a thing I struggle with; how can I expect someone to be a true fan of me when I've never been a true fan of anyone.

To some extent, there are lines you have to draw and there's going to have to be an imbalance somewhere. If I'm a true fan of 1000 people, having 1000 true fans of my own will just mean I break even (or not given platform fees and other expenses).

The imbalance I guess comes with the fact that there are more consumers than there are creators.

But how deep does that go? Is it true that creators are less likely to be true fans of other creators? Or is it just me? I don't know.

On the other hand, I can't get into the whole Substack thing because it feels like it's just writers supporting other writers with no opportunity to reach a wider audience. If you're not writing about writing, there's little opportunity for natural growth. The only true fans you'll find on Substack are other fans of writing.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this.

I believe finding and focusing on true fans is the key to success without selling your soul to the marketing gods. However, I've never been a true fan, so I have no idea where to look for them.

I think looking where you are is the best way to find true fans, but if I'm not anywhere, I either need to go somewhere or figure out a second-best option.

Almost Efficient Marketing

The second vague feeling I have about marketing to find true fans is that to find the smaller subset, you have to go to where the numbers are smaller.

Conventional marketing wisdom says you have to be on the big platforms to get the big numbers so that 1/100/100(/100) number gets as big a possible. But that's a lot of work to sort and sift though large numbers to find who you're looking for.

I feel that instead of focusing on sorting though a platform with millions of users, you will have more success finding a true fan sorting though and engaging with a platform with thousands of users. Sure, there may be only one person on that platform who could become a true fan, but there's a hell of a lot less noise to cut though for your voice to find them.

Also, in my case, smaller platforms are places I enjoy being in much more. It's kinda (hopefully) a win-win for me. If I'm unlikely to find someone like me, who would be a fan of my work, on social media because I despise social media, I'm more likely to find someone like me and would enjoy my work on a smaller platform because I enjoy it more.

There's also a thing about smaller platforms that makes community building better. Engaging with a smaller platform, while there are less people to see your stuff, there's less for those few people to see making them see you more often and more consistently. That's how real community is built.

Building a community around your work is obviously the most ideal, but using your work to add value to a preexisting community is the next best thing.

Back To Where We Are

I didn't consciously intend this, but it makes sense that I'd come back around and affirm the thing I've been doing (though not super well) all along.

When it comes to playing the game of marketing and finding true fans, really, the only effective strategy is and always has been authenticity.

If you can be authentic and use the massive social media platforms, that's where you're going to find your people.

If you have to fake it to be on those platforms, you are just wasting your time because you aren't going to find your people there.

I'm on BearBlog because I value everything it stands for. It's where I choose to be, so here is likely where I will find my people.

But, instead of engaging with the community, I've been keeping at arms length preferring to be a hermit and not engage with the social aspects of blogging. Modernmonk is my attempt to have a blog but keep my name off the title and a more 'professional' space to write my thoughts. There's nothing wrong with that per-say. I have a few true fans, though they are friends and relatives. In trying to present a 'professional' 'product' I've lost the personal touch of true authenticity.

While I have no plans of Modernmonk changing or going anywhere, I do want to foster this space. I am going to turn this blog into a true blog and use it to engage with this cool community here at BearBlog.

Yes, my hope is to find some true fans of my work; but more so I want my work to add value to this community and I want to find some people that I can become true fans of and support what they are doing.

So, I guess that's it.

I plan to revamp this place and do a lot of the fun blogger things like making various pages, adding a guest book (I hope. I'm baffled how you guys have added that to Bear.), and creating a fun theme to really make this little corner of the internet mine.

Wish me luck!

Oh, I guess this is where I should go ahead and use this whole thing as a marketing ploy by telling you to like and subscribe.

I'm only going to half do that.

Like/Upvote/Whatever if you genuinely did like this rambling rant and want more people to read it. One of the first things I'm going to do is use Bearming Theme to remove the Like counter. The numbers aren't what matters.

I'm not going to ask you to give me your email and subscribe. I'll leave it as a possibility if you really want me to have your email. You are using Bear, you know how the email works, if you want to find my sign-up page you can, but I'm not going to link it anywhere on here (for now at least). If you really want to subscribe and follow, do it through RSS. RSS is what I use to follow the people and blogs that I'm a casual fan of; it's the only thing I'm comfortable telling other people to do to me.

Lacking a Good Sign Off,
Evan